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Within the U.S. power grid, there's a hodge-podge of equipment both old and new in use today. A new report from American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) describes the country as having an electrical system first built in the 1880s by Thomas Edison then added to every year since. Power generation today is adequate, the experts say, but the distribution networks are deteriorating. ASCE recommends an infusion of $673 billion by 2020 to be spent one of two ways: either replace the existing devices wholesale or find ways to retrofit the devices already in the field.

Benjamin Jun, Vice President & Chief Technology Officer of Cryptography Research, Inc., said he sees pros and cons with each approach. Whether swapping out devices or improving existing ones, he said, you are introducing new functionality and features where there had been none before.

"The main challenge here is the access policies for controlling pieces of our infrastructure," he said.

For example, there may be a natural disaster situation where FEMA's involved and must control the power grid devices from 5,000 miles away Such disaster scenarios can be a security challenge, especially if it is a situation where only someone in a truck can physically touch the unit you're supposed to be adjusting. Jun, who has been meeting with power grid groups recently, said the response so far from utilities has been to change some underlying security assumptions, such as making a closed system, where only trusted personnel has access, more open, with more access is possible. "So the ability to change the firmware to allow the system to be more responsive to certain control messages is considered a bonus," said Jun.

Firmware is the coding that is stored on a chip inside the device and sometimes acts as both an operating system and an application. Unfortunately changing firmware remotely can open a Pandora's box of security issues.

"These systems generally involve what we call Flat Privilege structures, where any one specific node or firmware can do a lot of things, and has tremendous flexibility," Jun said. It is the equivalent of running everything as root on the node. And while it is possible to protect such a device out in the field, Jun said often that protection often lacks real-time context of what's happening. In other words, you can make the device reasonably tamper-resistant, but you probably won't glean any useful information about the attacks from it without monitoring or logging capabilities.

Some attacks we do know about.

Smart meters are not out on the power grid, they're located in the home. Currently smart meters are the target of criminal activity, such as organized crime in Europe helping people steal power from the electric company. US utilities have been warned of similar schemes after smart meters in Puerto Rico were compromised in 2010.

"When a certain profitable attack is executed, that information trickles down to people who might want to execute it for other purposes," Jun said.

Newer smart meters may be retrofit to fit these attacks, however, older systems, such as those installed in Austin, Texas, in 2002, and in Salt River, Arizona, in 2006, may need to be replaced.

One advantage of replacing devices on the power grid is that they can be designed for future attacks. Jun said embedded systems can be broken up into smaller pieces where the security boundaries are more clearly defined and much more easy to understand. "One of the easiest things to do," he said, "is start partitioning the system into separate processors, separate computing domains. Some existing micro-controllers already have this mechanism. A lot of processors already have this idea of a more privileged and less privileged code. ARM has trust zone, for example."

Jun concluded "We have to be quite proactive in how we design systems going forward. We can learn from other industries. And we can learn from other countries that have imposed smart grid before us."

But unlike the financial services industry, which took steps to eradicate fraudulent credit card swipers and ATMs, or the pay television systems, which took steps to stop counterfeit devices and theft of services, the US power grid may not enjoy that luxury. Given the hodge-podge nature of the power grid, and the vast resources required to update or improve it, power utilities don't have a lot of time to put the correct defenses in place. Still, we should probably make the effort.